She sat across from me and watched me knit for a while. “You look like you know what you’re doing. May I ask you a quick question?”
Uh-oh. “No quick question is quick. And I know just enough to create expletives. Ask.” I contInued knitting with the gray yarn.
“Well, I wanted to make an afghan but it’s my first big project and it’s taking longer than I thought and I don’t know how to speed things up. Any advice for a clueless newb?”
That sounds easy enough. “Practice. The more you work at it, the smoother your hands will flow, the smoother the yarn will pass. This is not the time for deadlines. This is the time for completion. Don’t be surprised if you look over earlier work and find evidence of your advancement.” I continued knitting at my steady pace.
“If there’s going to be a change between the start and the end, should I start over?”
I put the knitting down and looked at her. “If you never start, you’ll never finish. If you quit what you’ve started, you’ll never finish it. Which is more important right now, perfection you can not attain, or honing the skill you have?”
She smiled. “Indeed.”, was her only reply.
I looked in my lap to find the gray yarn was shimmering with every hue possible.
I blinked, and I was sitting alone again.
Somehow, I don’t think this was about knitting.